Variety’s pay wall is going to come tumbling down, informed sources say, now that the 107-year-old Hollywood trade title has been acquired by Deadline.com owner Jay Penske.

Penske, who is believed to have paid Reed Elsevier between $26 million and $28 million for Variety, is also said to be readying a plan to expand the brand internationally.

But the hottest rumor out of La-La-Land is that Bonnie Fuller, now editing Penske’s Hollywoodlife.com, will land the top Variety job.

It looks like a long shot. However, many insiders would not be surprised to see an exit of current Editor-in-Chief Tim Gray.

Penske, sources said, has already targeted India and Bollywood as the first overseas excursion.

PMC, Penske’s media company, was backed in the Variety deal by Dan Loeb’s hedge fund, Third Point, after Shamrock Capital dropped out. Loeb is already a big stockholder in Yahoo!

In India, PMC is partners with billionaire Subhash Chandra, the media mogul behind Zee Entertainment, in India.com. Unlike in the US, print is still growing rapidly in the subcontinent.

On the home front, Variety’s website attracts only 320,000 unique visitors a month, according to ComScore. That puts it far behind the 5.1 million monthly viewers at rival The Hollywood Reporter, and the 2.4 million unique visitors at Deadline.com, the fast-growing site started by Nikki Finke.

While the Variety site is expected to be free, it is less clear what changes will be coming to the print product. Daily Variety has circulation of 28,000; the circulation of the weekly is 30,000.

Variety has been starved for cash over the years as Reed Elsevier tried to sell it off.

But it still has profit of about $6 million a year on revenues of just under $50 million.

Third Point, which provided the equity financing for the Variety deal, would have to be willing to spend money to make money.

Reed Elsevier, an Anglo-Dutch company, in the end did not have to step in with seller financing to sweeten the deal, according to a source with knowledge of the deal.

Penske must now figure out how to integrate the venerable Variety operations with the websites controlled by PMC.

Finke, the founder and editor in chief of Deadline.com, will not be running new sister publication Variety, Penske told the LA Times, but she is expected to have some input into how breaking news is handled.

“What Nikki has [built] at Deadline is simply amazing,” Penske told the LA Times. “To alter or change the chemistry of Deadline would be, in our opinion, a huge mistake.”

Variety staffers have been on edge for months as the auction dragged on and potential bidders including Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa Cos. and Marc Lasry’s Avenue Capital dropped out.

In the wake of the deal, Variety president Neil Stiles is expected to leave, and nobody would be overly surprised if a good percentage of the 120 staffers now on board were gone as well.

Penske could not be reached for comment.

Bye, Jack

Jack Welch, the former chairman and CEO of General Electric, and his wife, former Harvard Business Review editor, Suzy Wetlaufer, are just like any other freelancers looking for work now that the duo has ended a contract to contribute a regular column to Fortune and Reuters.

The split is fallout from Welch’s tweet last week expressing skepticism about the validity of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ unemployment number.

Welch roundly criticized BLS for allegedly cooking the books to produce a 7.8 percent unemployment rate to help President Obama’s re-election effort.

Stories questioning Welch’s criticism ran on both of the media outlets that had been carrying the couple’s column.

While resigning, Welch said he would be contributing to the Wall Street Journal from now on — but it is apparently only a one-off.

So long, OK!

Jimmy Cohen, CEO of Hudson News, is getting out of the joint venture partnership with American Media that controls OK!

Cohen sold Hudson to Swiss-based duty-free shop operator Dufry Group but stayed on board to run it.

He has been investing in a wide number of products since then and had teamed with AMI to buy OK! from British press baron Richard Desmond for $23 million in July 2011.

The deal gave either party an escape clause to buy the other out for $11.5 million.

AMI CEO David Pecker confirmed that he had bought out Cohen with a down payment and the rest to be paid over six to eight months.

Desmond’ s Northern & Shell owns the highly profitable OK! in London but lost more than $200 million in its five-year effort to introduce the magazine in the US.

“It is making money now,” said Pecker, who has chopped total circulation from 1.2 million to 500,000.